Fireweed and Musk Ox

First we noticed with alarm that Hot Hot Hot, the Pasadena hot sauce boutique, had closed its doors. Then we heard it had merely moved its stock into another shop up by all the restaurants on Fair Oaks Avenue. The new home was described as a boutique of gourmet Americana.

CJ’s Gourmet Emporium turned out to be a couple of blocks beyond the heavy restaurant action, far from the bustle of Colorado Boulevard, and the gourmet Americana wasn’t at all what we expected. We were thinking canned scrapple, New Orleans pralines and buffalo jerky. Not even close.

There was a wall full of Hot Hot Hot’s sauces, as expected. At the opposite end of the store, appropriately, was shelf after shelf of exotic goods from Alaska. Alaskan gourmet foods! Who knew?

Between these extremes, more spaciously laid out than we would have expected, lay a surprising range of American foods. Some had the air of foodies trying their hands at a cottage industry, but most looked like established, though small-scale, local specialties.

Some of the Alaskan products were extraordinary. The fascinating spruce tip jelly was fruity and deeply tangy, with a certain pine-like air. Fireweed jelly had a flowery aroma and a note something like Concord grapes (in fact, something like the mayhaw jelly from Louisiana in another part of the store, though that also had a taste a little like tart apricots). There’s some richly flavored Alaskan honey, though at the price--$5.95 for 2 ounces--you aren’t likely to put it on pancakes.

The birch syrup wasn’t all that exotic; it tasted a lot like sorghum syrup, though perhaps a little more elegant. And though the canned musk ox meat was impressively meaty, all canned meat tends to taste the same, so the main attraction of that item was the bragging rights.

Then there were tropical fruit preserves and chutneys from Hawaii; peanuts from Williamsburg, Va.; Muscadine grape juice for those who like its odd flavor; and, from Wisconsin, strong honeys with added flavorings such as Key lime juice. Needless to say, there was a lot of boisterous Texas stuff--barbecue rubs, chili makings and a margarita-flavored jelly. You can get cast-iron corn stick molds for baking cornmeal muffins in a corn cob shape--or several other shapes, including chiles and cactuses.

From the Pacific Northwest come preserves and juices from many an unfamiliar variety of wild berry. From New England, the usual range of maple syrups and sugars with some less-familiar products, such as maple-based sauces made with various nuts.

From California come a wide variety of Armenian-style pickles from Zanont’s in Fresno and the hard-to-find E. Waldo Ward preserves, which have been made in Sierra Madre since 1891. Ward’s apricot preserves are luscious, clearly made from absolutely ripe fruit.

There were also a lot of local or old-fashioned candies, including taffy whips, candy-dipped pretzels and a unique hand-made product called Chocolate Lace. And the package of at least one pretty new one, Roy Rogers’ Happy Trails, a chocolate candy with a filling of peanut butter and ground trail mix, made by a young woman Rogers met on the show “Hee Haw,” will remind those of a certain age of their grammar school lunch boxes.

CJ’s Gourmet Emporium, 130 N. Fair Oaks Ave., Pasadena; (818) 585-8382 or (888) 2CJSFood; e-mail, [email protected]. Open Mondays through Fridays, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sundays, noon to 5 p.m.